


stop and smell the flours

by themuslimbarbie



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), DCTV
Genre: Baking, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 09:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5086300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themuslimbarbie/pseuds/themuslimbarbie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver stands in the middle of the kitchen wearing only a pair of sweatpants, muttering Russian curses at what appears to be a broken bowl of flour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stop and smell the flours

**Author's Note:**

> not beta'd

It’s nearly three in the morning when a shattering sound causes Sara to jolt awake. She instinctively grabs her bo staff and slides out of the bedroom and towards the source of the noise. The first thing she notices is the kitchen light is on. What she expects is a very unlucky burglar. What she hopes against is a very lucky enemy. What she finds is even more shocking:

Oliver Queen, standing in the middle of the kitchen wearing only a pair of sweatpants, muttering Russian curses at what appears to be a broken bowl of flour.

What. The. _Hell_?

His head snaps towards her and his eyes widen. He gives her a tight, embarrassed smile. _Sorry_ , he says. Did he wake her?

 

Cookies.

He woke up in the middle of the night with a craving for _cookies_. Cookies they currently do not have. Cookies he somehow decided were a good idea to _bake_. At three o’clock in the morning.

Sara glances from him to the kitchen counter filled with ingredients she didn’t know they had and dishes she knows for a fact are not meant to be used as measuring devices. She eyes an extremely large coffee mug caked in flour.

_Has he ever actually baked anything?_

_Well, one time Raisa –_

She rolls her eyes and doesn’t even bother letting him finish. She walks to the coffee machine and begins to brew a pot.

Step one, she tells him, Coffee. You _cannot_ have cookies without coffee.

He stares at her for a moment before a grin breaks across his lips. He walks over and gives her a quick kiss before he opens the cabinets and digs out a pair of mugs that aren’t caked in flour.

 

Oliver and Sara have always had this natural flow at doing things together, whether it be cleaning up the streets of their city or sneaking teenage Sara into a club she wasn’t nearly old enough to get into. They’ve always been able to work as a team, to find a balance, to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. To act as one fluid, harmonious unit.

Except, apparently, when it comes to baking cookies at three a.m.

They run into each other, drop half their ingredients on the floor, and accidentally add the same ingredients twice. Hell, it takes them three tries to even get the right number of eggs in the bowl. They are just one gigantic mess.

Every couple has its faults, Sara knows. She just always assumed theirs was the whole _sneaking around behind her sister’s back leading to horrible tragedies and endless amounts of baggage_ thing. Apparently she was wrong. Very wrong.

 

Sara’s in the process of loading their only successful batch of cookies into the oven when it happens. What exactly _it_ is, she has no idea, but whatever it is, it causes Oliver Queen, former billionaire playboy and current masked vigilante, to trip. With a bag full of flour in his hands.

Her instincts kick in before her mind can process what’s happening, and she turns to catch him. Which also causes her to collide with the bag of flour.

Oliver stares at her for seems like forever. He even uses his _super serious business_ face. But the moment Sara blinks, it all fades away and he breaks into this stupid grin, one that she’s pretty sure is only seconds away from full on laughter.

She reaches for the closest ingredient, the bottle of vanilla extract. His grin immediately faces and he holds his hands up defensively.

It was an _accident_ , he tells her. _Really_. There’s no reason to turn this into some sort of juvenile food fight.

She smirks mischievously. Step two, she says, No batch of cookies are complete without a juvenile food fight.

Oliver manages to make it two steps before Sara strikes.

 

He better not have ruined her favorite shirt, she tells him later, once they’ve come truce (read: they ran out of baking ingredients to throw at each other).

Oliver sits on top of a sugar covered counter top. He snorts and picks egg shells out of Sara’s hair and reminds her that it’s _his_ shirt.

Sara folds her arms over his lap and grins up at him. _Sure_ it is.

He laughs and wraps his arms around her, pulling her closer to him. Between his natural height and the extra life from the counter, he towers over her. Her head rests on the spot between his chest and stomach. He smells like vanilla and baking soda mixed with leather and overpriced cologne. Not that she has room to talk – she probably smells like eggs and flour mixed with leather and cheap bar perfume.

They’re a mess, she thinks not for the first time and wraps her arms around him.

Because they’ve always been individual messes, even before the Gambit. Him with his daddy issues and his partying, and her with her sister complex and her bad girl reputation. Then after the Gambit with his island trauma and her League years. It’s always been one giant mess after the next with them.

But sometimes, every now and then, when they combine their messes, they get something else. Something good.

Something a bit like three a.m. cookies.

 

The cookies burn.

Not technically, but they’re deep brown in the center and dark around the edges and annoyingly crunchy looking. They’re still edible but not appetizing in the slightest. So close enough to burnt to piss Sara off.

He stands behind her, rests his hands on her shoulders, and kisses the top of her head. He reaches for a cookie, and she turns around just in time to see him bite it. It makes his horrible crunching sound and little dark crumbles scatter all over his already food covered chest. Still, he grins at her sweetly. She smiles back up at him and leans up to kiss him. He smirks playfully when she pulls back, and holds up the cookie.

 _Step three?_ he asks.

 _Not on his life_ , she says.

He laughs and kisses her again.


End file.
